A great start to the book: a beautifully observed and written description of a wedding takes up the whole of the first lengthy chapter. The rest of the book fails to live up to this excellent start. What follows are a series of episodes in the lives of the increasingly wealthy couple and their two children over the following twenty years. On the plus side this book is extremely well written but the central characters are unsympathetically portrayed and unlikeable. The main theme of the book is money and the privilege it brings but there is no main plot line and it isn’t clear what the author is trying to achieve in this uncohesive series of short stories about the four main characters. Some elements are implausible; the accumulation of such wealth in a relatively short space of time doesn’t ring true and the son’s involvement with the artist jar. But a couple of scenes stand out: the broker Devon and the wrist watch, and Cynthia with her dying father are indicators of how good this writer can be.

The lives of the Morey family are the focus in this novel on love and wealth. The story opens with the marriage of Adam and Cynthia. Neither of them come from a ‘monied’ background, it is Cynthia’s stepfather Warren who provides the opulence from his bank balance……….. and neither of them had positive role models in their own parents. They are clearly in love. Their children, April and Jonas, are born quite early in the marriage and the stage is set. Adam is a character who despite coming across as not looking back into the past has an obsession about his health, which is clearly related to the ill health suffered from his father. He begins to lead a charmed life thanks to his employer and when doing what he is told bores him he becomes involved in trading on the side – which also coincides with life not moving fast enough for Cynthia. I felt he was a character who didn’t think about how his actions affected others. Cynthia also does not let the past affect her present. Apart from her love for Adam, this makes her appear shallow. If it wasn’t for how she reacted to a crisis with her children when they were younger, I wouldn’t have known that she actually loved them. In fact, I found the children’s earlier lives misleading as I thought Cynthia was going to be an over-protective mother but in their mid-teens she doesn’t even know whether they are in the penthouse or not! The characters come across to the reader as very believable – even the ones on the periphery whose lives we know little about but can tell from their actions the type of people they are. The Morey’s story is, I think, an accurate portrayal of two people who love each other to the exclusion of anyone else and how that effects all the other close relationships that should have been nurtured but instead are side-lined. It shows us that what some might consider to be a life lived successfully on the outside may be considered by others as scarred and broken on an inner level. JD has the dysfunctional family performing for us at an optimal level with the addition of the rich and ‘famous’ thrown in the mix. You may find yourself feeling uncomfortable at times – perhaps prompting you to look at your own ‘shadow’ side. It is definitely worth reading if you like to read about the rich and successful. My only disappointment is that I was hoping there would be a different outcome to Adam’s underhand trading!